After the Feed

(1)

Han, The Transparency Society (2012), 9-12. (paraphrased)

(2)

Bratton, The Revenge of the Real

( 2021), 7. (paraphrased)

(3)

Han, The Transparency Society (2012), 14-16.

(4)

Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics, 2013, 3.

(5)

Since Nox is the biased reporter, a character we created with elements that are addressing prediction as a political/economic weapon, we should definitely highlight Zuboff’s perspective about predictive governance = control. Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism*, 2019, 100–123.

(6)

Bratton, The Revenge of the Real ( 2021), 18-20. (paraphrased)

(7)

Bratton is a strong character, inspired by Benjamin Bratton’s theory, and central in the first scene. He believes in planetary-scale coordination, data systems, and sensing infrastructures—not surveillance as domination, but as modelling reality in order to protect life. His arc is defined by a desire to clarify rather than to win; he grows increasingly frustrated by persistent misreadings of technology. Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, 2016, 11–38.

(8)

Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics, 2013, 7-8. (paraphrased)

(9)

Bratton, The Revenge of the Real (2021), 14-22. (paraphrased)

(10)

Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics, 2013, 18-23.

(11)

Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics, 2013.

NOX: Minister Mouffe! Perfect timing. We’re live. ( Fig. 2) Why retreat into a café at the exact moment the people are fighting for systemic change on labour policies?

MOUFFE: Retreat? Please. I’m entering a café.

NOX: A café during a civic moment. Interesting.

MOUFFE: Your “civic moments” are mostly ambushes.

NOX: People want transparency!

BRATTON: (from his table still reading) “You confuse transparency with clarity. You confuse exposure with agency.” (1)

NOX: Excuse me?

BRATTON: “Governance is literally about life and death and not every form of sensing is surveillance. ” (2) You’re misdiagnosing the system.

NOX: Minister, are you saying citizens don’t deserve to see what the government sees?
“Because transparency is the new moral demand of democracy unless you disagree?” (3)

MOUFFE: I’m saying democracy is not reducible to exposure. Transparency without contestation only manufactures obedience. “If there is no conflict, it means someone has already decided for you.” (4)

NOX: So the elites agree citizens are unreasonable? (5)

BRATTON: “Western anti-surveillance fears come from liberal individualism.”(6) (7)

NOX: Minister, conflict is necessary, isn’t it?
So is this rally outside legitimate disagreement, or a threat the government wants to neutralize?

MOUFFE: “Agonism is not chaos. It is a structured disagreement. Democracy lives when opponents recognize each other as legitimate adversaries, not enemies to be eliminated. ”(8)

NOX: (turning to Bratton) Then clarify this: is predictive governance just algorithmic authoritarianism?

BRATTON: “Real governance depends on modelling real processes—pandemics, climate change, migration flows.”(9).
Models don’t erase democracy; they expose its stakes.

NOX: Or bypass the people entirely. ( Fig. 3)

BRATTON: Only when civic literacy collapses.

NOX: Minister, do you agree? Are citizens unprepared for modern governance?

MOUFFE: Deliberation requires shared vocabularies. “But post-democratic institutions produce spectators, not participants.”(10).

NOX: So who is failing?

MOUFFE: “Democracy fails when journalists ask questions only to inflame suspicion, not understanding. And this crusade for perfect ‘transparency’ you keep shouting about—it’s not journalism. It’s moral panic dressed as virtue.‘Conflict is constitutive of democratic politics.’” (11).

Scene Two: The Rally Intensifies

Arin & Peluza Enter

From stage right, PELUZA and ARIN approach from the protest. ( Fig. 4)

Peluza walks fast, anxious. Arin moves slowly, observing everything.

(12)

Han, The Transparency Society, 2012, 8–12 [paraphrased]

(13)

Han, The Transparency Society, 2012, 14–18 [paraphrased]

(14)

Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control, 1990, 4

(15)

Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control, 1990, 4–5 [paraphrased]

(16)

Hester & Srnicek, Post-Work, 2021,20–23 [paraphrased]

(17)

Lucia’s eccentric character resonates strongly with Judith Butler’s work in *Precarious Life* (2004) and *Frames of War* (2009). She feels that public visibility is a form of vulnerability, exposing individuals rather than empowering them. She thinks that public visibility can make people vulnerable and how being “framed” by media determines whether one appears as a full subject or a consumable image.

Butler, *Precarious Life*, 2004; Butler,*Frames of War*, 2009.

(18)

Han, The Transparency Society, 2012,14–16 [paraphrased]

(19)

Han, The Transparency Society, 2012,16–18 [paraphrased]

(20)

The poetic strong character or Arin, describes how AI systems as “all-seeing” infrastructures that capture human labour and perception, which could be seen as well in the perspective of Pasquinelli in one of his recent books. Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master (2023)

(21)

Han, The Transparency Society, 2012, 15.

(22)

Han, The Transparency Society, 2012, 17–20 [paraphrased]

PELUZA: I needed a break. Everything feels like it’s closing in—eyes everywhere, expectations everywhere. Even in a protest I feel like I’m performing for someone I can’t see. “It’s as if visibility has replaced participation. Like I’m more useful to the system as an image than as a person” (12)

ARIN: You are. We all are. Digital societies specialize in this. They make you feel like you’re choosing your own chains. “That’s how control works now not through force, but through voluntary exhibition” (13)

PELUZA: Let’s sit. (She gestures toward the café.)

They choose a table near Bratton’s. Peluza listens half to Arin, half to her pounding heartbeat.

PELUZA: Back there, it didn’t feel like we were fighting something real. More like punching fog. This system it’s not a building, it’s not a boss, it’s not a rule. It’s everywhere and nowhere. “Power becomes flexible, accelerated, instantaneous… with no center to oppose.”(14)
“A power without a location turns resistance into exhaustion — you spend your energy searching for something that keeps dissolving”(15)

ARIN: Exactly. That’s why digital freedom feels so seductive. Working from home, flexible hours, personalized feeds it all whispers You’re in control. But the whisper is a leash. The interface gives you options, but not decisions. “It narrows your world while convincing you it has expanded” (16)

Lucia Enters.

Lucia rushes in from the protest direction, filming with her phone, breath shaky but steadying.

She stops at the terrace edge, turns her phone toward the square, then toward her own face.

LUCIA: This is Lucia Vela, live, the protest is escalating but the energy is powerful, beautiful, we’re demanding dignity, transparency, fairness (17)

(She hesitates, lowers the phone slightly, voice quieter).

“But transparency… transparency eats us alive.”(18) “Because the moment you become fully visible, you stop being legible to yourself”(19)

She ends the livestream abruptly, exhales, and sits alone at a small table. Her hands tremble, but she hides it.

ARIN: (calling softly to her) Rough out there? (20)

LUCIA: It’s… loud. Everything wants a piece of you. Every gesture is content. Every feeling is a data point. And I helped build that world. “The obligation to exhibit oneself turns the body into an object of display… optimized, emptied.”(21)
“I didn’t realize the cost of turning everyone into content was that we would forget how to be subjects”(22)

(23)

Mouffe is a female politician-intellectual who insists that democracy needs real conflict, not managed disagreement. She fears that today even conflict is being platformized—turned into something smooth, governable, and harmless. A perfect reference for her is Jacques Rancière’s idea that democracies often mishear popular voices as noise instead of demand (Hatred of Democracy, 2005), which captures exactly how she understands the tension between protest, legitimacy, and institutional power. [Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, 2005]

(24)

Mouffe, Agonistics, 2013, 23

(25)

Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control, 1990, 5

(26)

Bratton, The Revenge of the Real, 2021, 41

(27)

Mouffe, Agonistics, 2013, 7

(28)

Bratton, The Revenge of the Real, 2021, 29

(29)

Bratton, The Revenge of the Real, 2021,63 — paraphrased

(30)

Peluza is shaped by the logic of the “control society.” He scrolls constantly, deletes constantly, feels watched not by a single authority but by the diffuse expectations of everyone he’s ever known. His nervous exhaustion fits with Jonathan Crary’s argument, where the collapse of rest and the demand for continuous responsiveness produce a permanent state of anxiety. [Crary, 24/7, 2013]

(31)

Han, The Transparency Society, 2012, 11

NOX: Minister Mouffe, the streets are demanding answers. Do you even hear them from here?

MOUFFE: I hear the difference between noise and demand. (23)

NOX: Convenient distinction. When institutions lose trust, “every silence becomes an indictment”. (24)

BRATTON: Not every outburst is a policy.

PELUZA flinches at the volume. LUCIA tries not to film. ARIN listens without looking up.

PELUZA: (low, to Arin)
He’s trying to trap her.
“This is how control feels from below— not as rules, but as pressure you can’t name”. (25)

BRATTON: We’re not separate from this. We’re in the same room — same system.
“Conflicts only look separate when power draws the boundaries”. (26)

Their voices aren’t whispers anymore. The cafe hears them.

NOX: (turning around instantly)
You three — you were out there. Tell her. Tell the Minister what people actually feel.

PELUZA: No. I won’t be your sound bite.

MOUFFE: (looking at them directly)
Then what do you want to say?
“A democracy without genuine conflict collapses into spectacle”. (27)

LUCIA: We want to be heard without being consumed.

BRATTON: People are scared. That doesn’t mean the system is failing — it means the system is exposed.
“Crises reveal the architecture we pretend is invisible”. (28)

ARIN: “And when that architecture treats society like a dataset, people become variables instead of voices. Variables get adjusted. Citizens get erased”.(29)

NOX: So whose fault is the fear? Government? Media? The crowd?

PELUZA: Everyone. No one. The whole thing. (30)

LUCIA: “And transparency doesn’t fix it — it just exposes the wound. Visibility without agency is just another form of submission”. (31)

MOUFFE: Then sit. Speak. All of you.

For a moment, all six share the same space — tense, fragile, necessary.

(32)

Han, The Transparency Society, 2012, 22

(33)

Peluza and Lucia are the emotional core of this scene. Their fear, the trembling sense of being watched or followed, forms a shared moment of panic that isn’t just about lost connectivity — it’s about lost legibility. Their blackout feels targeted, personal, like an invisible hand deciding who gets to speak and who gets to disappear. This aligns with Safiya Noble’s analysis in Algorithms of Oppression (2018), where algorithmic systems don’t only sort information — they perform erasure, selectively silencing certain voices and making others hyper-visible. [Noble, Algorithms of Oppression, 2018]

LUCIA: My live just… died. My camera won’t even open. It’s like— “my body, my posts, my life—turned into an object of display, optimized and emptied.” (32)

PELUZA: Mine too. Everything locked at the same time. Only for us—the ones who were at the rally.

NOX: YES. Selective shutdown! This is exactly what they do when they’re afraid. (Fig. 11)

BRATTON: (Checking his own phone, still active) Not a grid collapse. Targeted. Deliberate.

LUCIA: (Gets up, grabs Bratton’s phone) Let me—just one second—please.
She opens his camera app. It loads… then flashes ERROR and force-closes.(33)

LUCIA: It followed me. Not the phone. Me.

PELUZA: (Voice cracking) So they can switch us off whenever they want.

A blackout? No. A filtration. A velvet blade. Only the voices that might spread are silenced. (Fig. 12)

(34)

Arin’s broad, atmospheric perspective aligns with John Durham Peters’ The Marvelous Clouds (2015), which frames media not as tools but as environments; Arin experiences the blackout as an environmental rupture rather than a technical failure. [Peters, The Marvelous Clouds, 2015]

(35)

Han, The Transparency Society, 2015, 1–2, 48–49 — paraphrased

(36)

Mouffe, Agonistics, 2013, 64 — paraphrased

(37)

Mouffe’s critique of “managed anger” resonates with Poell, Nieborg & van Dijck’s argument in Platforms and Cultural Production (2021), where they show how platforms govern social behavior through visibility structures, channeling expression into forms that are measurable, sortable, and ultimately manageable. [Poell, Nieborg & van Dijck, Platforms and Cultural Production, 2021]

(38)

Mouffe, Agonistics, 2013, 7–8 — paraphrased

ARIN: (looking at the dark screens, steady) Has the blackout taken something from you—or revealed what you were never allowed to question?(34)

LUCIA: (voice low, shaken) If I can’t upload… I don’t exist. No trace. No witness. “Freedom becomes a form of control when we surrender to the panoptic gaze voluntarily.” (35)
I thought visibility protected me. Now it feels like it was the trap.

NOX: (shouting into his dead phone) They’re killing the narrative! This is how it starts— hidden hands, secret networks, engineered silence!

MOUFFE: (sharply) Shouting into a corpse does not make you a revolutionary. Your rage is directionless—and directionless anger feeds the system.
“The platform invites your anger, then converts it into data points and graphs. That is not listening; that is management.” (36) (37)

NOX: So you admit they’re manipulating us!

MOUFFE: I admit something else: “I do not want to end conflict; I want to decide who benefits from the way it is organized.” (38)
And right now, no one is benefitting from this unorganised mess. (Fig. 13)

(39)

Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control, 1990, 4

(40)

Han, The Transparent Society, 2012, 18–22 — paraphrased

(41)

Mouffe, Agonistics, 2013, 7

(42)

Bratton, The Revenge of the Real, 2021, 12–17 — paraphrased

(43)

Mouffe, Agonistics, 2013, 15–21 — paraphrased

(44)

Han, The Transparent Society, 2012, 18–22 — paraphrased

(45)

The Stack returns as a central reference because both Bratton and Arin inhabit the tension it describes: governance no longer lives primarily in institutions, but in infrastructures, platforms, protocols, and computational layers. For Bratton, this is a design challenge — planetary-scale systems that manage health, risk, and coordination can be built well or built disastrously. For Arin, the same systems feel poetic and crushing: a world where decisions migrate into models, classifications, and predictions long before anyone can debate them. [Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, 2016, 11–38]

(46)

Mouffe and Peluza both express the core feeling of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism (2009): the sense that the political horizon has collapsed. Peluza feels it as anxiety and helplessness — everything is fluid, managed, impossible to resist. Mouffe analyzes it as a post-political order where conflict is tolerated only when it’s harmless. Together, they embody Fisher’s idea that the system feels total, inevitable, and hard to imagine otherwise. [Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 2009]

PELUZA: (voice trembling, overwhelmed) I don’t understand— if they can shut us off whenever they want, how do we resist when everything is fluid; codes, not walls?
“Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change.” (39)
So how do you fight a modulation?

LUCIA: (breathless, angry but tired) Exactly. We walked into this willingly.
“The digital society of control makes intensive use of freedom… It is only possible thanks to voluntary self-illumination and self-exposure. It exploits freedom.” (40)
Freedom became a stage light. We keep it pointed at ourselves.

NOX: (sharp, frantic) This is censorship! Selective silencing! The government is terrified of what we might show—that’s why they cut the feed!

MOUFFE: (irritated but careful, like a minister holding the line) No one is “terrified” of you. Governments respond to instability. Sometimes badly, sometimes brutally.
“Conflict in liberal democratic societies cannot and should not be eradicated, since the specificity of pluralist democracy is precisely the recognition and the legitimation of conflict.” (41)
But conflict has to exist somewhere not just in trending hashtags that vanish in a day. Too much emphasis on a fake consensus leads to apathy. Too much unmanaged conflict leads to collapse.

BRATTON: It’s not just filtering. It’s governing through models.
When decisions migrate into infrastructures, you don’t see the decision — you see its effects.
“To have inadequate modeling is to have inadequate governance.”
Testing, sensing, modeling — these become the condition for a society to “comprehend itself and compose itself.” (42)
The problem is that the same infrastructures can be turned toward stability or manipulation. Your blackout wasn’t a moral judgement. It was a classification event. You moved from useful signal to risk.

PELUZA: (sinking into the chair) “Risk”? I’m not a risk. I’m a person. I was just… there. Standing in a crowd.

ARIN: To the system, you’re not “there.” You’re a set of probabilities that either support or disturb the preferred outcome. That’s what happens when labor, care, and time are only visible as data points—never as lives.

NOX: So freedom of expression—is just decoration now? A mural on the prison wall of “stability”?

MOUFFE: (losing patience, but still a politician) Freedom of expression still exists. You’re shouting right now—no one has taped your mouth. The problem is different: the shared arena where expression can actually transform the order is shrinking.
“Every hegemonic order is “always the expression of power relations,” and any apparent “natural order” can be challenged by counter-hegemonic practices. But if parties blur, if real alternatives disappear, citizens “lose interest in politics” because nothing they say seems to matter.” (43)
That’s not just a technical glitch. That’s a political failure.

LUCIA: But the failure has a user interface. The blackout showed it. Freedom didn’t shrink—it was redesigned.
“The digital society of control makes intensive use of freedom…It exploits freedom.” (44)
We feel more expressive than ever, and yet we’re easier to manage. That’s the mask.

PELUZA: (quiet, devastated) So the world that felt open was just a shape they needed us to move in?

LUCIA: A shape we helped build. A cage we decorated with our own content and we called it empowerment.
Not a cage. A management system. One that can, in principle, be re-programmed.

MOUFFE: (softly now, the minister more than the theorist) Democracy isn’t dying. It’s being administered. That’s the danger. When politics is reduced to management, conflict doesn’t vanish—it just goes elsewhere.
And if we don’t bring that conflict back into visible, contestable institutions, some other system will handle it for us. Quietly. (45)

NOX: And we’re supposed to accept that? Just live inside the “management system” and send polite feedback?

ARIN: No. We’re supposed to see it. Because as long as control feels like freedom, we’ll keep defending our own choreography. Once you see the mask, you can at least stop mistaking alignment for autonomy.(46)

They fall silent.

LUCIA: (automatic) I should… go live again. People will want to know what happened.

She flips her camera, finds her light, checks her angle. NOX’s screen explodes with breaking-news banners and follower DMs.

NOX: (grinning, already composing) “This was a targeted digital strike on democratic voices…” Yeah. That’ll trend.

Peluza stares at a health app notification: “You’ve been inactive for 47 minutes. Time to move!” He taps it. Stands up. Sits back down. Starts scrolling. Moufee’s phone rings with a party aide’s call. She half-turns away from the table.

MOUFFE: Yes, I’m safe. No, don’t escalate. We’ll call it “a technical anomaly.” Prepare a statement.

The protest dissolves into posts. The blackout becomes a story. The story becomes a metric. And the city, once again, runs exactly as expected. (Fig. 15)